The Future of Work and the Future of Local Land Use
In articles about the effects of Covid-19 on the future of work, it’s worth asking: whose work?
A recent New York Times article by Dror Poleg describes the office of the future as “more of a consumer product.” It argues that workers who have the option to work from home may only come in to a main office for important meetings or infrequent availability. Office space, or more desk-sharing, may pop up in what were considered relatively sleepy communities pre-Covid:
a Brooklyn or Queens resident who previously commuted to Manhattan may opt to work several days a week in a shared space within a 10-minute walk from home. Some large employers are already experimenting with satellite offices in the suburbs of cities in which they already have a downtown headquarters. The main office will remain important for most companies, but fewer employees will be expected to be there all day, every day.
The attraction of this working lifestyle is simple: shorter commutes, more opportunities to collaborate selectively with colleagues, and simply put, more worker control over how one spends one’s time.
What this “consumer product” analysis of office space obscures is the relationship of different types of work to each other. Worker autonomy for the white-collar workers described in the Times article may lead directly to a loss of autonomy for the blue-collar workers whose livelihoods depend on dense central business districts. Parcel delivery, lunch-rush restaurants, and exercise facilities - as well as the workers who fulfill those services - would encounter piecework without the multitude of office workers who rely on them. One worker’s benefits become another’s precariousness.
It is a planner’s role to understand how these industries (and the classes of workers they rely on) intersect with each other, and how the “consumer product” of white collar labor is less the office space and more the neighborhood surrounding it. The neighborhood is more than a product for white-collar workers -- it is the density of cross-class demands and desires that form a socialized space.
Life Outside the Screen
In Peleg’s Times telling, work is a consumer good, almost like a video game you get paid for playing. For those who work at home, whose work laptop is connected to the internet and the whole thing feels a bit disconnected from reality. This may be especially so for workers who are in what the late David Graeber termed “bullshit jobs” that exist with a tenuous link (if that) to social efficacy.
Work-as-a-product is a conceit, and it speaks to the atomized and, frankly, alienated way most workers pursue their labor. There are downstream effects from all those keystrokes and mouseclicks, even if they are abstracted from the person sitting at home.
The most obvious of these effects take place outside the office entirely: the things a worker does when they’re not working. Ordering takeout to the desk, stepping outside for a coffee break, going to a spin class after work - these are all locally-based economic activities that only take place within a certain distance from the workplace. And these activities only exist when enough people with enough similar interests are within a close enough distance to make these cafes and gyms economically viable. In short, they require office buildings.
In the field of economic development, these economic activities are grouped under “multipliers.” One consultant explains multipliers as follows:
a new business will spend money in the local area and this spending will support not just employees in the new business but spin-off workers in other businesses throughout the area.
Another way to think of this is that nobody’s entire salary goes straight into savings. Each person buys things with their salaries, and those purchases go to pay somebody else’s salaries, on and on down the line. You’re not just buying a rice bowl, you are paying the people who make the rice bowl their salaries.
There are two key concepts here: the first is that work is not just something the worker does, but something that links the worker to a chain of social relations. The second is that the “work from home” workers only make up a small slice of the local labor pie. Everything that comes to the home worker, comes from someone who cannot work from home.
Work as Social Engagement
Lloyd Alaban at San Jose Spotlight did a remarkable job examining how work-from-home affects the service economy in San Jose:
The shift to virtual work has proved devastating for the service industry ... an industry that almost exclusively employs essential, in-person workers. These workers are disproportionately Black and Latino and low-income workers who have been hit the hardest by the pandemic.
“The businesses that are relatively dependent on that daytime population — the small businesses in particular — will be challenged, even as we get a vaccine and life begins to look normal,” said Jeff Bellisario, executive director of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.
Ease-of-work for laptop workers leads directly to increased precarity for service workers at a region-wide scale. This goes beyond income but rather looks at things like hours lost, shift from full-time to part-time work, and increased commutes that occur without urban planning interventions.
This is not to urge workers to get back to the office, and especially not to rush back to unsafe workplaces and to risky work conditions. It is to acknowledge that unsafe workplaces and risky work conditions are still the norm during the Covid-19 pandemic, and only certain classes of workers have been sheltered from it. People who have the privilege to bring their work safely to home also have the social obligation to bring with them the social engagement their work is wrapped up in. By reimagining land use in the Bay Area, a post-pandemic work environment has the potential to be a radically more equitable one.
Gentle Connectivity
The Bay Area, if not the vast majority of the United States, is suffering from two distinct urban planning issues: a gross mismatch of work/residence location, and escalating inequality. No matter their income level, people are commuting farther to work -- but people who receive lower incomes and have less access to generational wealth are commuting even further. This latter group is also suffering in other ways, with poorer medical coverage and often multiple jobs to patch together a living wage.
An Equity Profile of the Nine-County San Francisco Bay Area Region (PolicyLink and PERE: 2017), page 83. Available at: https://www.policylink.org/research/an-equity-profile-of-nine-county-san-francisco
“An Equity Profile of the Nine-County San Francisco Bay Area Region.” (PolicyLink and PERE: 2017), page 34. Available at: https://www.policylink.org/research/an-equity-profile-of-nine-county-san-francisco
Sarah Treuhaft with Jessica Pizarek, Ángel Ross, and Justin Scoggins, “Solving the Housing Crisis Is Key to Inclusive Prosperity in the Bay Area.” (PolicyLink and PERE: 2020), page 15. Available at: https://www.policylink.org/resources-tools/solving-housing-crisis-bay-area
These issues are arguably related to the one countrywide demographic trend of wealthy communities disqualifying poor communities from access to opportunity (in the form of good schools, jobs with career trajectories, and public goods such as parks and libraries). A residential neighborhood is much more than a place to live, it is also a bundle of benefits and amenities that have been inequitably distributed. There is a long struggle through American history, a civil rights struggle, to distribute these with liberty and justice for all.
“Income Inequality in the San Francisco Bay Area.” (Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies: June 2015”, page 12. Available at: https://jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/income-inequality-2015-06.pdf
The current juncture, when more people who have the ability to choose work from home, may introduce a way to alleviate these inequalities. If work-from-home introduces people to a lifestyle where they want amenities closer to homes, and these “amenities” are better understood as “other people,” then these home-work neighborhoods could be reimagined to diversify the amenities - and the communities - in wealthy neighborhoods.
Thomas Fisher argued for something similar in the American Planning Association’s recent discussion of remote work, where he was interviewed by Brian Barth:
The more time people spend at home, he believes, the more they will advocate for a range of activities within walking distance, whether green space or entertainment options. The mixing of uses will start organically. "Corner coffee shops may morph into micro-coworking spaces with good coffee.”...
"What does land use mean anymore when people are living, working, shopping, learning, and producing things out of their homes? What is a residential district anymore, as opposed to an industrial district or a commercial district or an office district?" he asks. "We've allocated land into these zones that may not match how people are actually living and working in the future. We're going to need a more flexible and inclusive system that will allow people to adapt — that's the opportunity."
A “flexible and inclusive system” could, almost by definition, mean anything. But what it seems to mean to Fisher is an receptiveness to change in the existing land use fabric. A post-Covid recalibration of the neighborhood, led by a consumer-driven shift in workplace demand, could lead to more attractive and more inclusive spaces. The office isn’t the product, but the neighborhood is the product. And neighborhoods don’t work unless they’re full of neighbors.
More residential uses in downtown urban cores - and more commercial uses in suburban or suburban-ish residential areas - would mean a gradual spread of uses and amenities through an urban agglomeration. This admixture of uses could include things like accessory commercial units, recognizing and promoting home industry, and supporting missing-middle housing to create a gentle density that allows workers to live by these new businesses and to induce demand for their goods. After all, someone who can’t get by selling 10 loaves of bread a day might be able to pay rent with 100 loaves sold.
If this looks a lot like the “15-minute city” made famous by the mayor of Paris, well, it’s not accidental. A city where people across employers and income levels have to share resources and space is a more equitable city. It is also, the argument goes, a more pleasant city. One does not need a white-collar job to prefer short commutes, good coffee, and more time with family and friends. That’s not a consumer product, but a goal that urban planners should have in mind when they plan for life after - and during - the pandemic.